Playing politics with Menifee's roads

The Menifee City Council got all starry-eyed this week over a new traffic plan, but the priorities of that plan differ markedly from those some of the city's elected officials stressed in their campaigns before last year's election.

The ambitious plan is meant to correct traffic flaws, and flows, around Menifee’s best future asset and its current worst liability. Interstate 215 is the aorta that cuts through the center of town, carrying Menifee residents to work in other cities. Someday the roads that surround it will be links to Menifee’s important economic corridor. That is, if the retail market ever recovers.

But for now, McCall Boulevard and Newport, Haun, Antelope and Scott roads are a mess to maneuver, especially in peak traffic periods. They just weren’t built for a city of 82,000 people that still has plenty of room to grow.

So during a workshop on Tuesday, the council heard phrases like “full-court press” and “full-steam ahead” to get this problem corrected, starting in August.

Delivering the message were two new cowboys the council has brought on board. And I could have sworn they were wearing white hats. Shawn Nelson, Temecula's former longtime city manager, is now a $126,000-a-year consultant for Menifee. Jonathan Smith is the staff’s acting city engineer who, with Nelson, helped build this plan.

They delivered a list of projects that starts with the widening of a short stretch of Newport Road east of the freeway and ends in 2016 with construction of a freeway overpass at Holland Road.

Wait a minute! Did I hear that right? The plan ends with the Holland Road overpass?

Hmm. That was not the message from Mayor Scott Mann and Councilmen Wallace Edgerton and Greg August as they ran for their seats last fall.

“Holland Road should be the No. 1 project,” Mann said at an election forum. “We have three east-west arterials in town: Scott, Newport and McCall. If they begin work on Newport without the Holland overpass, can you imagine what a traffic mess it would be?”

Well, get ready, Menifee. If this plan is approved ---- and there is little doubt that it will be ---- you’re about to find out.

According to the plan, work on the Newport Road interchange will begin in early 2014 with two other new projects ---- sure to channel more traffic to Sun City ---- working at about the same time.

The Menifee Road “missing link” between Newport and McCall roads will be completed next year and work will finally begin on a full-blown bridge on Bradley Road where it crosses Salt Creek.

The irony is that many of the elements presented this week were basically the same that defeated candidates Darcy Kuenzi, Sue Kristjansson and Bill Zimmerman, hit on during the campaign last fall.

Build the Newport interchange first, they said. We’re already too far into it. To stop now and build a Holland overpass first would delay everything else by at least two years.

They took their cue from then-City Manager Bill Rawlings, who said the same things but resigned soon after the election. As he rode out of town, the man must have felt he was the one wearing the black hat.

Edgerton said by phone on Wednesday ---- while stuck in a Haun Road traffic jam, no less ---- that his change of opinion is reflective of a new council, new attitude and new management in City Hall. Things had become so bad last fall, he said, that is was hard to believe anything that management was telling them.

“I felt that if all things were not considered, we would have begun with Holland Road,” Edgerton said. “Now there may be hell to pay from the residents when building begins on Newport. But the council thinks there had already been so much work and pre-planning that it would be foolish to backtrack and start with the Holland overpass.”

It sounded a little like back-pedaling, but apparently it points out another aspect of politics. It’s not what is said that counts, but who says it, and when.

Nelson was praised for his work the other night, especially in finding more funding sources to help pay for this much needed roadwork.

But I’ll reserve judgment on his claim that when all this work is done, Menifee will be proud of its road system. Remember, this is the guy who spent two decades playing a vital role in building Temecula’s road system.

And for all those who have tried to get through that city’s intersections and endured long waits and frustration on the streets surrounding Interstate 15, you know there’s not much to crow about.